Ocean Biogeographic Information System
Encyclopedia
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

 in the ocean
Ocean
An ocean is a major body of saline water, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, a continuous body of water that is customarily divided into several principal oceans and smaller seas.More than half of this area is over 3,000...

.

History

It originated in an idea and prototype system developed at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

 by a team led by Dr. J. Frederick Grassle that included Yunqing (Phoebe) Zhang, Karen Stocks, and Carolyn Flanders. Later, it was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic non-profit organization in the United States. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors.-Overview:...

 and other sources to become the information management component of the Census of Marine Life
Census of Marine Life
The Census of Marine Life was a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans...

. According to the official OBIS web site, the OBIS Portal "accesses data content, information infrastructure, and informatics tools - maps, visualizations, and models – to provide a dynamic, global facility in four dimensions (the three dimensions of space plus time). Potential uses are to reveal new spatial/temporal patterns; to generate new hypotheses about the global marine ecosystem; and to guide future field expeditions."

The initial OBIS Portal at Rutgers University has been online since 2002, with accessible data growing from about 500,000 observations and data points when first launched, to over 10 million as at mid-2006, from a growing network of over 140 data providers in more than 50 countries worldwide. As of August 2010, OBIS contains 30 million observation from over 120,000 species. Available data cover all groups of organisms that have any association with marine or estuarine habitats, also including shorelines and the atmosphere above the ocean, such as marine vertebrates (fishes, marine mammals, turtles, seabirds, etc.); marine invertebrates (including zooplankton
Zooplankton
Zooplankton are heterotrophic plankton. Plankton are organisms drifting in oceans, seas, and bodies of fresh water. The word "zooplankton" is derived from the Greek zoon , meaning "animal", and , meaning "wanderer" or "drifter"...

); marine bacteria
Bacteria
Bacteria are a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals...

; and marine plants (e.g. phytoplankton, seaweeds, mangroves).

OBIS portal

The OBIS Portal also hosts, or provides links to, a variety of software tools that can operate on OBIS data to provide mapping, analysis, or data modelling services, including the KGS Mapper, the c-squares mapper, and the ACON mapper, and this number is expected to grow significantly in scope and capabilities through time.

OBIS released a new version of its portal on 27 September with several new web-based features that allow for more detailed searches of observations.

Regional OBIS nodes

Over the period 2004-present, an international network of Regional OBIS Nodes has also been established, that are facilitating the connection of data sources in their region to the master OBIS data network and also increasingly provide specialised services or views of OBIS data to users in their particular region.
Hosted by Belgian Biodiversity Platform, Brussels and by Flanders Marine Institute, Oostende. Managed by Bruno Danis
Hosted by Centro Nacional Patagonico - (CENPAT) - CONICET. Managed by Mirtha Lewis
Hosted by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - Marine and Atmospheric Research. Managed by Tony Rees
Hosted by Centre of Marine Biodiversity and Bedford Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Bob Branton
Hosted by Institute of Oceanology. Managed by Sun Xiaoxia
Hosted by Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee. Managed by Ward Appeltans
Hosted by National Chemical Laboratory and National Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Baba Ingole
Hosted by National Institute for Environmental Studies. Managed by Junko Shimura
Hosted by National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research. Managed by Don Robertson
Hosted by Southern African Data Centre for Oceanography. Managed by Marten Grundlingh
Hosted by University of Concepcion. Managed by Ruben Escribando
Hosted by University of Sao Paulo (USP) and Reference Center on Environmental Information (CRIA. Managed by Fabio Lang Da Silvera
Hosted by National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). Managed by Mark Fornwall

Selected publications about OBIS


Regional OBIS nodes


Affiliated projects


History

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